Then I pointed out perception rolls, and he said "But of course to spot it visually you'd need to roll crazy high."

So I look over my sheet and I have SURGED for electrosense, so I asked if I could use that, he let me at -4 because my observe in detail was on something else at that round. I rolled for it, spent an edge, and ended up with 6 hits.

Do mines have any electrical currents (or even components) in them? I can see the batteries going dead rather easily if they did. Or does your electrosense also trigger every time you walk over a buried pop can?(Either way, I think 6 successes with an even vaugely applicable sensne would twig you- olfactory enhancers would let you smell the buried explosives, for example.)

Which reminds me- smell is a frequently neglected sensory cue that can certainly save your life... and is easy to augment.

Yeah, smell is easy to augment, but with all the places shadowrunners go would you really want to? The character with a heightened sense of smell would have my avatars look on their face most of the time... I could see them investing in earplugs for their nose. Hmm... a select smell filter... I'll be rich.

Cyber based smell augmentation allows you to ignore the smells of things you don't like. Smell isn't like sound in that it requires fancy filtering to separate out different components (though SR level computers should make that fairly easy). If you had a cyber-nose, you could fairly easily disable (say) the chemical receptors that detect hydrogen sulfide (a component of body and sewage odors) without affecting those that detect (say) explosives.

Do mines have any electrical currents (or even components) in them? I can see the batteries going dead rather easily if they did. Or does your electrosense also trigger every time you walk over a buried pop can?

The answer is. . . it depends on the mine. Also, if the circuit is not completed until pressure pad is stepped on, some well ruggedized batteries could last 2 or 3 years no problem, a decade or two if you environmentally sealed the electronics package. But, at that point, just go with mechanical triggers.

Electrosense only works for detecting electricity / changes in electrical fields. Now, as an electrical engineer, I could argue that the metal in the mine would experience a very small induced electrical field due to the movement of the earth / magnetic poles and all that jazz. . . but hey, with 6 hits on the test, I'll buy that for a dollar.